October 2008

October 31, 2008

The perils of thinking you can save money by not employing a checker or proofreader are demonstrated by a story from Swansea in Wales. All road signs have to be written in Welsh and English in Wales, so council officials sent the phrase "No entry for heavy goods vehicles. Residential site only" to a translator by email. The reply came back, but unfortunately it was an automatic 'Out of office' message. The council went ahead and got the signs printed, so now Welsh-speaking motorists are faced with a road sign that reads "I am not in the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated".

Swansea isn't a Welsh-speaking area but what most shocks me is that not a single member of the Swansea council staff involved had the slightest knowledge of the Welsh language, not even the word "please". Here is the story, a picture and more Welsh blunders.

Today is Halloween so I thought I'd look at the tradition from a linguistic point of view. Halloween is sometimes spelt Hallowe'en, the apostrophe standing for a missing 'v', where 'even' means 'eve'. It's a shortened form of All-Hallow-Even, and can also be called the Eve of All Hallows. Hallow means holy person or saint.

31 October was an important date in pre-Christian Celtic culture as it was the end of the harvest and the end of the year. The festival celebrated on the date was known as Samhain ('mh' is pronounced 'w') and the Celts believed that the souls of the dead came back to visit their old homes and families on that night.

In the 9th century the Christian Church transformed the old pagan festival, which honoured all dead, to a festival honouring only the blessed or hallowed dead. 1 November, the start of the new year, was known as All Hallows' Day, Hallowday or All-hallomas. Shakespeare has Allhallowmas. The Church introduced the alternative name All Saints' Day to cement the Christian connection.

Today's Halloween traditions owe more to Hollywood and the marketing industry than to Celtic culture. Here in the UK we complain about the americanisation of Halloween, but it was Irish immigrants who took the festival of Halloween to the United States in the first place. In Ireland they used to carve out turnips and put a candle inside in memory of 'Stingy Jack' a drunken old farmer who tricked the devil and was then condemned to wander the earth for the rest of his days accompanied by a single candle. Pumpkins were more readily available in North America so Jack-o'-lanterns are these days more likely to be carved out of pumpkins.

The expression 'trick or treating' goes back only to the 1930s (in the US, that is - it's more recent in the UK; the OED's first British citation is 1982). The activity itself goes back much further - to the old practice of 'souling' where people would go from door to door to solicit specially baked 'soul-cakes'. This activity continued into the early 20th century in parts of northern England and in Scotland, where it is known as guising.

October 30, 2008

I was listening to From Our Own Correspondent on BBC Radio 4 this week and there was a report from Krasnoyarsk in Siberia (a town with a big aluminium plant, and thus linked with oligarch Oleg Deripaska, who is in the British news because of controversial meetings he has had with senior politicians). Reporter John Sweeney described the town as the worst dump he'd ever been to (you can listen here until Saturday; click on the Saturday edition button). The 'dump' epithet is ironic, given that the town's name promises something much different.

'Kras' is a common prefix in Russian place names (there's Krasnodar in southern Russia, for instance, as well as several smaller towns - Krasnogorsk, Krasnoarmeysk and others). It comes from the word красный, krasny, which these days means 'red', but which used to mean 'beautiful', hence its appearance in so many place names. Krasnoyarsk's town council website (in English) says the town's name means 'beautiful bank' (Krasnoyarsk is on the Yenisei river).

Red Square dates back to the 15th century, long before 'red' became associated with communism. Its name meant originally the 'beautiful square'; in Russian it's Красная площадь,Krasnaya ploshchad'. Here krasnaya has a feminine adjectival ending to agree with ploshchad', square, which is a feminine noun, but it is from the same root as the 'kras' of Krasnoyarsk.

Eunoia is the shortest word in English which contains all five vowels. The word was coined by Aristotle to describe a blissful and benevolent state of mind. Eunoia is also the title of a book by Canadian poet Christian Bök (his definition is 'beautiful thinking'), which consists of five univocalic chapters; in other words each chapter is made up of words containing just one vowel. Here's the beginning of the A chapter:

Awkward grammar appals a craftsman. A Dada bard as daft as Tzara damns stagnant art and scrawls an alpha (a slapdash arc and a backward zag) that mars all stanzas and jams all ballads (what a scandal). A madcap vandal crafts a small black ankh -- a handstamp that can stamp a wax pad and at last plant a mark that sparks an ars magna (an abstract art that charts a phrasal anagram). A pagan skald chants a dark saga (a Mahabharata), as a papal cabal blackballs all annals and tracts, all dramas and psalms: Kant and Kafka, Marx and Marat. A law as harsh as a fatwa bans all paragraphs that lack an A as a standard hallmark.

Brilliant! Bök was on Radio 4's Today programme this morning. Eunoia took him seven years to write, and in that time he read the three-volume WebstersNew International Dictionary five times, making a note of all univocalic words. He embarked on the task because he was fascinated by the Oulipo group of French poets and mathematicians of the 1960s, who imposed new structures and constraints on their writing. One of this group was Georges Perec, whose work La Disparition doesn't include a single 'e' (he also wrote Les Revenentes,in which 'e' is the only vowel used throughout).

Bök set himself even more rigid rules: he managed to include 98% of all univocalic words in the dictionary (he only left out about twenty words, which include gingivitis and belvedere, which he couldn't fit in to the 'storyline'). He also set himself the extra task of 'suppressing' the letter 'y' and that letter appears rarely.

Bök found that each vowel had its own personality due to the words it's found in: A is courtly, E elegiac, I lyrical, O jocular and U is obscene.

To hear the radio interview with Bök, go to the 30 October page of the Today website; the interview took place at 8.20. Extracts from each of the five chapters are here. Bök said his favourite bit of the book was the beginning of the I chapter, so here it is:

October 29, 2008

Predictably, the furore regarding the prank calls made by laddish presenters Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand on BBC Radio 2 to actor Andrew Sachs, has been dubbed 'Sachsgate' by some elements of the media and blogosphere.

If you're not up to date with the story, google any of the people above or look at the front page of any tabloid newspaper. The target of the lewd phone calls was Andrew Sachs, best known for playing the put-upon waiter Manuel in Fawlty Towers, who is now (it seems hard to believe) 78 years old. BBC listeners and newspaper readers seem to be confusing Sachs with his character, and have jumped in their thousands to his defence, as viewers of Fawlty Towers always jumped to poor Manuel's defence during his altercations with Basil.

Words with '-gate' tagged on to the end, which denote a scandal, are examples of snowclones (which I mentioned recently). The original scandal which gave rise to the use of '-gate' was the Watergate scandal of 1972. Here are some British '-gate' scandals:

Betsygate - a 2002 scandal concerning the wife of the then leader of the Conservative Party, Iain Duncan Smith, who was on her husband's payroll.

Camillagate - a 1990s scandal when intimate phone calls between the Prince of Wales and his then lover Camilla were recorded.

Squidgygate - a scandal during the late 1980s when intimate phone calls between the Princess of Wales and her alleged lover James Gilbey were recorded. Squidgy was Gilbey's nickname for Diana.

Pizzagate - an incident in 2004 when someone threw a pizza at Sir Alex Ferguson, manager of Manchester United, during an argument he was having with Arsène Wenger, manager of Arsenal.

Baftagate - a 1991 scandal at the BAFTA awards when Prime Suspect was declared the winning drama serial, but some of the jury said they'd voted for GBH. They asked to see the votes but the paperwork had been destroyed.

October 28, 2008

The Conservative Party has hired a PR agency, PrettyLittleHead, to help them appeal more to women voters. The agency has reportedly advised the Tories to tone down their "Punch and Judy" style of argument in the House of Commons, and to stop trading macho insults with their opponents.

Language will play a big part in attracting women, although, interestingly, I cannot find the words "language" or "words" anywhere on PrettyLittleHead's website. In theory, there should be no need for a different approach to men and women voters; we all want the facts, as we are perfectly capable of making up our own minds. But not many politicians give us the straight facts.

One problem I have with a "feminine approach" is that women are not all the same. We all want different things, have different priorities, don't necessarily agree with each other and very often find we have a lot in common with men.

Having said that, if Tory MPs talked like Russell Brand, Jonathan Ross or Jeremy Clarkson (laddish TV presenters), they would definitely turn off women (although possibly not younger ones - that's the problem with trying to appeal to women en masse).

Companies and advertising agencies have always adopted different approaches when marketing to men and women, and the women behind PrettyLittleHead, who are from an advertising background, will no doubt transfer marketing-speak to the political arena. If you don't believe that companies use a different marketing strategy, just look at the names of popular perfumes or aftershaves - Jungle, Diesel, Ironman, Brut and Boss are men's products and Love in Paris, Allure Sensuelle, J'adore, Amarige Mariage and Dolce Vita are women's perfumes. Clearly, apart from anything else, women are more likely to speak a foreign language!

According to PrettyLittleHead, there is a male achievement impulse and a female utopian impulse. Men are competitive while women value collaboration, and want a safe, secure and harmonious world. Thus, adverts geared at men use words like "win", "eliminate" and "immediate", and Tesco uses the word "help" in their adverts ("Every little helps") and runs campaigns to supply schools with computers.

Actually, what politicians need to do is show women, not tell them. Women don't want to be patronised by politicians saying "We understand women"; they want facts and information about the real issues, they want both sides of the argument and they don't want negative advertising (which includes putting down the Opposition or putting down men in general).

If I were advising the Conservative Party (or any of the other parties) on what to say to appeal to women, I would tell them to use the pronouns "you" and "we", and to use wording which stresses that women are valued and important - phrases like "You can make a difference", "Your vote matters" and "We're listening".

October 27, 2008

I came across the word "kin-state" for the first time recently, plus various other words connected to it, including kin-nationals and kin-minorities. It refers to a state which has a national minority living in another country (called the host-state or home-state). Russia is a kin-state to ethnic Russians living in Ukraine, the Baltic states and other former Soviet republics. Armenia is a kin-state to the Armenian inhabitants of Nagorno-Karabakh, an enclave within Azerbaijan. Germany is a kin-state to a large German minority in Romania, and so on.

The term "kin-state" dates back to a 2001 dispute between Hungary and its neighbours, particularly Romania. Hungary passed a law granting preferential treatment to its citizens in neighbouring countries, and the neighbouring countries didn't like the fact that Hungary had acted unilaterally. The Venice Commission of the Council of Europe (or to give it its full title the Council of Europe Commission for Democracy through Law) ruled on the matter.

This whole area is a legal minefield - the Commission recognises that even the concept of "nation" is interpreted differently by the various parties. For a more detailed account of this subject see here.

October 26, 2008

There was a piece on a BBC Radio 4 news summary earlier today about a conviction in the case of the recent murder of a young Chinese couple in Newcastle. The announcer reported it as the murder of "Xi Zhou and her boyfriend Zhen Xing Yang". I wondered why the BBC had mentioned the young woman's name first. Was she the intended victim of the murder and her boyfriend just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time? Did the BBC mention the woman first as a deliberate policy to counteract potential accusations of gender bias? After all, women are so often described in the media (and in life generally) as someone's mother, wife, widow, girlfriend, secretary etc.

On the BBC's website the same story has the names the other way round - "Zhen Xing Yang and his girlfriend Xi Zhou". So, there goes the second theory! I checked a few newspaper reports of the story. Many gave the young woman's name first, but this seemed to be because they were lifting their words directly from a Northumbria Police spokesman, who was the source for the report. I wondered if this police force followed a particular pattern when reporting the sex of murder victims so I went to their website to check.

The webmaster of Northumbria Police obviously doesn't work weekends because there is no mention of the story on its website. The latest news item is dated 23 October. The top pictured story on the front page of Northumbria Police's website is the theft of a little girl's toy pram (I'm writing this at noon (local British time, or GMT) on 26 October - the timings given on the postings on this site are Californian times).

Apart from the issue of whether the man or woman is mentioned first in a newspaper story, there is another issue. Why mention the sex of the victims at all? Do the media think that readers are going to feel differently if they realise a woman has been murdered, rather than two men? Is there an element of titillation in the reporting?

These issues only occurred to me when hearing the news report because the victims were Chinese. If the murder victims had been called Fred and Alice, then there would have been no need to mention their sex. The wording of the reporting, therefore, must be deliberate.

October 25, 2008

I went for what I hoped would be a nice quiet walk in Bushy Park, near Hampton Court Palace, earlier, but traffic was being diverted through the park as a result of a fire at a mansion which once belonged to David Garrick, the acclaimed 18th-century actor, so it wasn't as peaceful as usual.

In its report on the story the Daily Mail reported that David Garrick was linked to the phrase "Break a leg!", said by actors wishing one another good luck before going on stage. Garrick supposedly carried on playing the role of Richard III despite a broken leg.

Just like everything else in the Daily Mail, this statement is rubbish. The theatrical associations of the expression "break a leg!" date back only to the late 1940s. The idiom "break a leg" supposedly existed in the 17th century, but it apparently meant "to give birth to an illegitimate child" (I cannot confirm this), and this sense is unrelated to Garrick or the theatre.

No-one knows for sure what the origin of the expression "break a leg!" meaning "good luck!" is. It's not in the OED and there are 57 different senses of the verb "to break" in that dictionary, so it's not easy to guess which meaning was originally meant. Some say that "break" means the same as "bend", so what actors were being wished was the necessity of bowing or curtsying lots of times during many encores. Others say that "break a leg" in the sense of "try very hard" is meant, ie actors are being exhorted to put effort and energy into their performance.

Yet another suggestion is that "break a leg!" is taken from the German expression Hals- und Beinbruch, also meaning "good luck!", whose literal meaning is "break your neck and a leg". This idiom was apparently popular with Luftwaffe pilots (so it's unclear why it transferred to the theatre). It's said that the German expression comes from a Yiddish saying, hatzlakha u-brakha (I've also seen it spelt bracha v'hatzlakha), which is said to wish someone success and blessings.

October 24, 2008

Elfdalian sounds like something out of Lord of the Rings, but it is a language spoken by about 3,000 people in central Sweden. Once regarded as a dialect, linguists now say that it should be considered a language. It does not, however, have official minority language status in Sweden (unlike Finnish, Romani, Saami, Tornedalen Finnish and Yiddish, which do). Elfdalian has preserved many ancient linguistic features and until the 19th century it still had a Runic alphabet, which went out of use in the rest of Sweden in the 14th century.

Some people born in the area before the 1950s knew no Swedish before they went to school, but young Elfdalian speakers today are bilingual. Elfdalian cannot be understood by Swedish monolinguals. In contrast to the situation with other minority languages in Europe, there has been a resurgence of interest in Elfdalian; nursery school teachers report that increasing numbers of young children speak the language at home and since the 1980s concerted efforts have been made to publish dictionaries and other books in the language, an ambitious task given that there is no standard orthography in Elfdalian.

Elfdalian is a grammatically inflected language with three genders. Unusually, it has a number of nasal vowels, as well as the sound ð, which is like the sound 'th' in the English word 'them'.